Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Compassion was too soft a thing anyway. Anger came of disgust, and was of more use, most of the time.

The camp where Phiti was held was at Ford Howard; the old “place of safety” where the colonial government had “confined” Mweta. Shinza was alert to Bray all the time, intent to be one jump ahead of his mind. He said dramatically, “We’ll plough that place over and plant it. It just mustn’t be there, any more.”

A tremendous dust-storm blew up on Boxer’s ranch, coming through the pass from the Bashi Flats. Feathers, leaves, maize-husks, ash and rubbish from people’s fires danced in the vortex of dust-devils that swayed toppling columns up into the sky. The wind was hot. In place of the sun an apocalyptic red intensity moved down the haze; people sniffed for rain in the turbulence, although it might not come for weeks yet. They sat tight in their huts. Bray stayed the night after all, sleeping naked in a stifling room closed against the wind with Shinza, Nwanga, and the schoolmaster. He could just as easily have driven home through the night, but he had a strange reluctance to step outside the concreteness of the atmosphere between himself and Shinza; these men. They talked until very late: the unions, Vietnam, the Nigerian war, the Arabs as Africans, Wilson’s failures in Africa, and Nixon’s cooling towards its white-dominated states; about the unions again. He had allowed himself to forget, for years, the superiority of Shinza’s intellect. Lying there in the room that smelled of the sweat of all their bodies, the dregs of their beer, and the bitterness of cigarette ends, hearing the man snort, turn on the cheap iron bed uninhibited in acceptance of himself in sleep, as he was always, Bray thought how it was a remarkable man, there — like many of the other remarkable men on this continent who had ended up dead in a ditch. Then the blacks blamed the white men for manipulating power in a continent they had never really left; the whites blamed tribalism and the interference of the East (if they themselves were of the West) or the West (if they themselves were of the East). The remarkable men talked of socialism and the common man, or of glory and Messianic greatness, and died for copper, uranium, or oil. Mweta was one of them, too. Mweta and Shinza. For him-Bray-the killing had been made, for Mweta, already. The phrase in political jargon was “yielding to pressure”; it’s finished him off, as I knew him. Couldn’t say how Shinza would go, yielding to another kind of pressure (but I couldn’t kill him, he lied; and I lied, accepting it?).

Neither away in England, nor the other end of the world …

He thought he didn’t sleep but he must have, because the words hung there.

A man was sitting with Rebecca in the living-room. The room was dimmed against the heat.

But Hjalmar Wentz was in the Silver Rhino; in the capital!

Wentz and Rebecca sat deep in the sagging old morris chairs on either side of the empty fireplace, sunk in the silence of each being unable to explain his presence to the other. So great was the awkwardness that neither could get up.

“Well Hjalmar! What are you doing here!” He released them, Rebecca’s eyes signalling a complicated anguish, warning, heaven knows what, Hjalmar saying with a painful smile, “Well, you did ask me, perhaps you remember …?”

The fact that his platitude of greeting had been taken as a protest warned him more explicitly than Rebecca’s eyes. “I just never thought I could get you up here no matter how hard I tried … this is splendid … when did you arrive … are you”—but the eyes, absolutely yellow now with intensity, signalled—”… you drove up all the way?”

A shaky gesture — a smile that twitched faultily and an attempt at humour: “Don’t ask — I got here. And Rebecca gave me a nice lunch.”

“That’s splendid. I simply gawked … couldn’t believe it. I’ve been off trudging round some schools … just eating dust all day. I must have a shower — was there a terrible wind, here, last night?” They talked about the weather; “Well, some tea first and a bath later. Wash the dust down instead of off … have you got your things in, did Kalimo look after you all right?”

“Yes, yes — Rebecca gave me a very good lunch, avocados fresh from the tree, everything, the service was first class!” The voice seemed to wind automatically out of the stiff blond face. Bray and the girl were standing round him as if at the scene of an accident. She said, “I must dash.” “My best to Aleke,” Bray said, but followed her to the garden by way of the kitchen on the pretext of ordering tea.

She was waiting for him. “Something ghastly — you didn’t hear the radio? — Ras Asahe’s fled the country. Emmanuelle went with him.”

“Why should Asahe do that? Are you sure? Has he—”

“Only mentioned Emmanuelle. ‘I suppose you know Emmanuelle’s gone away,’ he said to me, but I was afraid to ask, I was afraid he wouldn’t stay calm. Oh my God, I thought you’d never come. I phoned the boma and said I couldn’t come back, I was feeling ill or something. I couldn’t leave him alone. I don’t know what’s happened … with them. He doesn’t mention Margot. ‘Emmanuelle’s gone’—that’s all. And then we just sat with nothing to say. I don’t know what he thinks about finding me in the house as if I owned the place. Well — I don’t think he notices anything at the moment. But why come here? Why to you?”

“Oh my darling … I’m sorry … don’t worry.” He looped her hair behind her ears — she was so pretty, now, with her hair grown. He wanted to kiss her, and doing so, not caring that Kalimo had come out to throw tea-leaves on the compost, felt the whole warm body fill the shape it had made for itself within him.

“How long will he stay?”

“My love, don’t worry.”

“Now I won’t be able to come here tonight.” She suddenly pressed her pelvis up against him in misery.

“Bloody hell. Oh come, why shouldn’t you. We simply won’t offer any explanation, that’s all.”

“Yes. Yes. — Oh why choose here, why couldn’t he have gone somewhere else.”

“It’s all right, it’s all right.” He stroked her hair as if it were some delightful new texture he had never had in his fingers before.

“Would you like to make love to me now?”

“Of course.”

“Damn him,” she said. They nursed each other against their resentment.

He went with her to her car, touching her hair. As she started the engine she turned to him a smile of pure happiness. “So I’m coming.” He nodded vociferously. She lingered over him a moment longer: “You’ve got dust in every line of your face.” He understood what she was saying. “I know, my darling.”

And there was the man and his misery waiting.

Bray went in, to him.

He felt conscious of his own height, his heavy, healthy muscular bulk — his wholeness — as he stood there; it seemed to owe an apology, to be an affront. He took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his bush jacket and gestured it to Hjalmar before taking one.

“Anyone have any idea why Asahe should have done it?” he said.

The haggard blond face winced into life. “He was at the hotel on Wednesday evening — she rushed in and said she was going out for an hour. She came back very late — must have, I had already tidied up and gone to bed, and she wasn’t home yet. Then on Thursday I understand she took some clothes to the cleaner and insisted they must be done the same day. Apparently she begged Timon — the head — waiter — you know — it was his day off and she asked him to pick them up when he came from town. She didn’t want her mother to know about it, you see — so she must have already decided then.… Friday she was quite normal, quite normal, nothing … and in the afternoon she said she was going with a few friends for the weekend at Matinga, to the dam. She even, came into the office and asked me to get her water skis out of the storeroom. Can you believe it?” The face went blank again. He got up suddenly, struggling slowly out of the chair so that Bray had to hold back the urge to put out his hands to help him, as from interference in a private act that should not be observed. The man walked across the room, his jacket peaked up crushed over his shoulders; faltered in sudden loss of purpose. “She was with me in the storeroom and we looked among the rubbish for the water skis. She said to me had I never tried, and I told her we didn’t do it when I was a youngster, and she said but you used to ski properly in the snow and you use the same muscles — she said I must come one day and try. She said, you feel powerful, don’t you, when everything is rushing past — you feel you can do anything you want.” He began to shake his head very hard in order to be able to go on. “She actually went with me to get the water skis.”